Question

I am using the following script to create a tarball of a directory with php

exec("tar -zcvf archive_name.tar.gz *");

and this is working as expected, but I would like to extend this code so that it will only add files to the tarball that have a certain extension (*.log in this case) then delete the originals after the tarball has been created. Any advise or examples would be great.

TIA,
Kevin

Answer 1

You can change you command to:

exec("tar -zcvf archive_name.tar.gz *.log && rm -f *.log")

Changes made:

• Instead of passing all file (*) as
  argument to tar we now pass *.log

• Added && rm -f *.log. The command
  rm -f *.log forcefully deletes all
  .log files from the present working
  directory. We’ve used an && as the
  glue between the two commands because
  we want the files to be deleted only
  after the tarball is created.